When neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan marched last summer in Charlottesville, Va, American Jews were scared witless. The marchers were members of tiny, marginal groups with no influence, but the imagery of their torchlight parade conjured up the nightmares of the Jewish past.

The fears sparked by Charlottesville resonated because the scene was familiar. We know what that enemy looks like and what to think about them. But when it comes to a more insidious and potentially far more dangerous threat to Jews, the face of hatred not only looks different but is also completely unthreatening. That’s especially true when young and supposedly idealistic Jews promote anti-Semitism.

An example of how that works came last month in Durham, NC, where the city council passed a resolution banning the local police department from taking part in “military-style training” in Israel. The measure was the result of agitation by Jewish Voice for Peace and its allies in the Black Lives Matter movement. Ostensibly the goal was to push back against a national trend of militarizing law enforcement that is supposedly linked to police shootings of African-Americans. But the real purpose was to score a victory for the BDS movement that would undermine Israel and smear American Jews.

Those activists aren’t the only new face of anti-Semitism that doesn’t resemble the familiar image we saw in Charlottesville.

The leaders of the Women’s March — the movement that has organized the mass protests against the Trump administration and become the face of the “resistance” to the president — also happen to be supporters of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan is a well-known anti-Semitic hatemonger, but people like Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, who are the face of the Women’s March, aren’t so easily categorized, and the instincts of some of their conventional liberal allies is to defend them.

But, they, too, are the new faces of anti-Semitism. Mallory is currently in Israel on a propaganda tour organized by a left-wing outfit. On Sunday, she blamed President Trump’s travel ban and border wall on the president following Israel’s “playbook.”

Blaming Israel for American bigotry goes hand-in-hand with votes like the one in Durham, which was largely a response to Jewish Voice for Peace’s Deadly Exchange campaign. That campaign seeks to isolate Israel and illustrate the intersectional ideology at the heart of the alliance between Black Lives Matter and anti-Zionist groups.

Supporters of intersectionality falsely assert a link between the struggle for racial equality and gay rights with the war on Israel.

They now assert that Israel and the American Jews who promote training in Israel for US law enforcement personnel in lifesaving techniques are somehow to blame for police shootings of African-Americans in this country.

As crazy as that sounds, it should be eerily familiar to students of history. Blaming Jews for crimes, especially the murder of innocents, even though they had nothing to do with them, is a classic trope of anti-Semitism. The JVP campaign is merely an updated version of medieval blood libels, where Jews became the scapegoats for whatever was bothering the populace.

In this case, some of the people trying to convince us that the Jews are responsible for horrible crimes are often themselves Jewish. As JNS.org reported, two of those who spoke in favor of the Durham measure were Jewish Voice for Peace activists who also teach Hebrew school at local synagogues and work for local Jewish groups. They come across like well-meaning Jewish liberals who want to make the world better.

But their purpose is to eliminate the one Jewish state on the planet and associate Jews who support Israel with horrible crimes entirely unconnected to it.

The false distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism here is exposed as a lie. Their pose of idealism is a facade for a noxious form of hate whose goals are identical to those of terror groups like Hamas.

It’s easy to oppose classic villains like the Charlottesville marchers. It’s harder for some of us to speak up just as strongly against more presentable hatemongers who appear as conventional liberals rather than members of the lunatic fringe.

But we’re going to have to accept that the new and far more dangerous face of anti-Semitism doesn’t always come clothed in a white sheet or with a swastika. Sometimes it comes in the form of young people who have the chutzpah to say they’re championing Jewish values.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS — the Jewish News Syndicate — and a contributor to National Review.